Commerce chief, lawmakers to meet on fishing limits

Thursday

Apr 29, 2010 at 12:01 AM

NEW BEDFORD — U.S. Commerce Secretary Gary Locke will meet May 12 with the 20 members of Congress from the Northeast who wrote to him last week, seeking relief from severe fishing limits being imposed on the fishing industry starting Saturday.

STEVE URBON

NEW BEDFORD — U.S. Commerce Secretary Gary Locke will meet May 12 with the 20 members of Congress from the Northeast who wrote to him last week, seeking relief from severe fishing limits being imposed on the fishing industry starting Saturday.

The exact time and place of the meeting has not been set, according to spokesmen for U.S. Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., and Sen. John F. Kerry, D-Mass., both of whom signed the letter to Locke.

The petition asked Locke to intervene and use what they said is his legal authority under the Magnuson-Stevens Act to amend fishing allocations on an emergency basis. Despite many pleas from the industry and from Northeast political leaders to NOAA and to Commerce, the federal government so far has changed nothing with regard to catch shares or the new sector management system being launched this weekend.

The fear is that limits for certain "choke" species are set so low that they will be reached very early, forcing whole groups of boats, called sectors, to stop fishing for the year entirely when they are only months or weeks along.

Little has changed regarding fisheries law enforcement, either, apart from the removal of Dale Jones as head of the enforcement office. Jones' fate was sealed after the Commerce Department's inspector general, Todd Zinser, revealed in sworn testimony to Congress that Jones had shredded up to 80 percent of his own files while under investigation.

New Bedford attorney Pamela Lafreniere, who represents several fishing boat owners in their dealings with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, met early this week in Gloucester with Jones' interim replacement, Alan Risenhoover, and Charles L. Green, deputy assistant general counsel for enforcement and litigation at NOAA.

Lafreniere told The Standard-Times that the NOAA officials listened to what she, Gloucester Mayor Carolyn Kirk and others had to say but offered nothing of substance and little in the way of comment. As an attorney, Lafreniere said she is particularly vexed by NOAA Administrator Jane Lubchenco's position that the agency won't look back at its own prosecutorial record, which was heavily criticized by Zinser. Worse, she said, NOAA intends fully to look back at the fishing industry, which she said creates a double standard.

"They're not even willing to admit that they've done anything wrong," she said.

NOAA had intended to conduct a forum in Gloucester last Monday about law enforcement, but Kirk and New Bedford Mayor Scott W. Lang threatened a boycott if the agency's top enforcement officials in the Northeast were going to be allowed to attend when they, too, are implicated in the enforcement scandal. The forum was postponed at least 60 days and instead the NOAA officials came to Massachusetts to meet privately with some of the parties.

NOAA has never directly acknowledged Jones' removal as law enforcement chief, never saying whether he was fired, transferred, demoted or retired. And the agency has refused to discuss other possible firings since the inspector general's report.